The Ultimate Labor Strike

As our economy slides further down the anti-worker slope - demonizing the unemployed and forcing people to work without pay - remember that traditionally labor strikes aren't about featherbedding, but about life and death.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

We sometimes don’t immediately think of the history of slavery as labor history, but of course, it’s absolutely fundamental to any understanding of labor history in the American South (and to a lesser extent in the North) both before and after the Civil War. This series will cover major events in the history of slave labor as well as events more typically thought of as labor history.

On September 9, 1739, the largest slave rebellion in the American colonies before the American Revolution took place in South Carolina, when a group of recent arrivals from Africa, probably the Congo, under the leadership of a man named Jemmy, rose up in arms, deciding that death was preferable to slavery. About 20 men started, but they recruited about 60 more as they marched. They began on a plantation about 20 miles southwest of Charleston, along the Stono River. They hoped to reach the Spanish fort at St. Augustine, which they had heard offered freedom.

September 9, 1739 was a Sunday. The South Carolina legislature had recently passed the Security Act of 1739, which made it law that plantation owners must carry weapons to church on Sunday, fearing slaves would revolt on Sunday when their masters were at church (isn’t really only a matter of time before South Carolina passes a similar law again). Knowing this, the Stono slaves chose one of the last remaining Sundays before the was to go into effect (September 29, 1739) to launch their desperate rebellion.

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The South Carolina legislature responded harshly to the Stono Rebellion, inaugurating some of the first truly restrictive slave laws in the North American colonies. The Negro Act of 1740 banned reading in English for slaves, the right to assemble in groups. raise food, earn money, and allowed slaveowners to kill their slaves. South Carolina also made it more difficult to free slaves, forcing slaveowners to ask the legislature for permission in order to manumit their human property. Some of this wouldn’t be enforced much. For instance, owners of South Carolina’s lowcountry rice plantations found they could make more money if they allowed their slaves to have rifles and hunt for themselves rather than provide food. But the Negro Act became one of the first steps toward making South Carolina not only the center of North American slavery, but the leader in suppressing black rights and the use of maximum violence toward slaves.

Another outcome of the Stono Rebellion was that slaveowners intentionally began mixing the ethnic background of their slaves, rightfully assuming that rebellion would be more difficult if people couldn’t understand each other, or even better, came from enemy tribes. This later became a strategy for capitalists in America’s 19th and early 20th century industries to prevent unionization. It also helped convince slaveowners that keeping slaves alive had value, since American-born slaves were less likely to revolt than recent purchases.

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For more information on the Stono Rebellion, I strongly recommend Peter Wood’s Black Majority, the classic book on the subject.

Liberals know all wealth comes from labor. That's why owner/parasites are always desperate to prevent labor exercising its power.